Video: Andrew Goff

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The District Attorney’s office will bring three charges against a local woman after she blew through a red light on McKinleyville’s Central Avenue during a Black Lives Matter demonstration on June 11.

As depicted in the video above, the driver — Jessica Perkins — drove through a crowd at a high rate of speed, narrowly missing several pedestrians and a couple of people on horseback.

According to District Attorney Maggie Fleming, who wrote to the Outpost this afternoon, Perkins will be charged with reckless driving, driving through a red light and failure to yield to pedestrians in a crosswalk. The charge follows a long investigation by the California Highway Patrol.

After the incident, Perkins posted a comment on the Outpost’s Facebook page in which she admitted to being the driver of the silver Honda Pilot in the video above, and said that she was sorry to have “scared people”: 

In email to the Outpost, Colin Fiske, executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities, said that he was disappointed stronger charges were not brought.

“From video and witness accounts it seems clear that this person was attempting to use her vehicle to injure or kill innocent people,” Fiske wrote. “CRTP is disappointed that the charges don’t seem to reflect the seriousness of the actions. Also, this is not an isolated incident. There has been a pattern of vehicular ramming attacks on Black Lives Matter activists in recent months, spurred on by right-wing media, and several people have been killed. The fact that driving a car is a daily activity for many people, and therefore seems ‘normal,’ doesn’t make this kind of crime any less serious or potentially deadly.”

Perkins is scheduled to be arraigned at 8 a.m. on Sept. 25, according to Fleming.